Jordan Peele Recruits Al Pacino to Track Down Nazis in ‘The Hunt’

2019 is shaping up to be a big year for Al Pacino, who stars in two of the most anticipated films of the year between Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And as if that’s not enough, the Oscar-winning actor is joining another cool project, as Collider has confirmed he’s in final negotiations to join Jordan Peele‘s Amazon series The Hunt.

Logan Lerman is set to star as Jonah Heidelbaum, who finds himself swept into a secret group known as The Hunters, who are devoted to rooting out Nazi officials who now live in America under assumed identities. Pacino will play a veteran Nazi hunter who becomes his mentor. Peele had originally planned to cast an unknown as the young protagonist, but when Lerman threw his hat in the ring, the producer changed his mind, knowing the Perks of Being a Wallflower star could both deliver the goods as an actor, as well as raise the series’ profile given his supportive fanbase.

Image via Millennium Films

The Hunt hails from Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Sonar Entertainment, and Amazon has given the vengeance-driven series a 10-episode order. David Weil created the show and will serve as showrunner alongside Nikki Toscano, and the two of them will join Peele as executive producers along with Sonar’s Tom Lesinski and Jenna Santoianni, and Monkeypaw’s Win Rosenfeld.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) is expected to direct the first episode, which is slated to start production this February in New York. The Hunt is set in the late ’70s and based on an original idea by Weil, though he’ll be drawing from real-life events here.

While Pacino has starred in plenty of TV movies, such as HBO’s Paterno, Phil Spector and the Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don’t Know Jack (the latter of which won him his second Emmy following Angels In America), he has never starred in a TV series before, so this is a big deal for one of the world’s greatest living actors. He’s represented by CAA.